In keeping with the theme of this year's conference, "Geographies of Visualand Literary Culture,"this panel will explore the ways in which the traveling modernist writerengages with technologyand how his or her body moves or positions itself in a Modern text andcontext. Considering the phenomenological implications of travel, we areinterested in bodily negotiations of or interactions with technologies ofmovement and travel and in how such technologies facilitate poetic exchangeand inscription. What are the effects of new and perhaps rapid and jarringmovement on the Modern subject? If travel provides an opportunity for a bodyto be moved, un-rooted, dislocated and disoriented, how does such a journeyaway from the familiar serve as a search for self through contact with newspaces, with the unfamiliar, and with others—how or does one map andposition oneselfin the Modern world through close contacts with others via technologicalmeans? How does technology propel and/or compel both the body of the poetand the body of the text itself?In what ways does the form of the poem reflect the modes of travel andtechnology that occasion them? What is the relationship between the poet whois actually in motion and the way that motionis inscribed in the text poetically and artistically? We are interested notonly in the literal modes of travel of the early twentieth century, but alsoin the ways other technologies, such as the cinema, radio, and telegraph,might be considered technologies of travel. Ultimately, we ask, how is thebody moved, shocked, electrified, energized, transported, unsettled, orextended by these technologies of travel and transmission? We areespecially interested in papers that engage with visual and materialculture.Topics might include:• Travel poetry/narrative — journeys into and away from self• Futurism and the poetry of planes, trains, and automobiles• Simultaneous poetry• Vorticism and the image• The train and the cinema in Modern culture• Displaced poets or poets away from home• Technologies and the "scene of writing"• The radio/ gramophone/ telegraph / cinema and poetic transmission• Poets and séance• The poetics of postcards and letter-writing• Byzantium and other imaginary journeys• The flaneur in the Modern city

Please send abstracts of 250 to 500 words along with a brief CV to AdrienneWalser and Amaranth Borsuk (adwalser_at_hotmail.com) by Saturday, May 5, 2007.